A War on All Fronts: Using Simultaneous Games to Enhance your 40K Campaigns

Wars are never isolated battles, and battles are seldom discrete events that occur in a vacuum.  In reality, these events happen concurrently, and often affect each other in unexpected ways.  In your 40K narrative campaigns, the best way to represent a really large, climactic event is to actually play it as several events at the same time.

When my group gets together, we realize that games of Warhammer 40K take a long time, and as such, we may not be able to get to all play against each other on a given day.  To offset this, we like to take 2-3 concurrent games and link them together in a narrative way, and give each table the opportunity to help score points towards a greater victory.

To illustrate, I'll talk about an event we ran just a few weeks ago.

The Battle of Eldritch V

This battle was to represent a climactic clash between Imperial and Tyranid forces on a death world.  Since it was supposed to be a huge event, we decided to play the main table as a 6,000 point apocalypse game, on a 6X6' table.  It was a pretty impressive sight, to say the least.

Insert Starship Troopers reference here.

Naturally, despite the huge table, we couldn't squeeze all of our players onto this one game, and we wanted everyone to be able to participate in a major plot event for our campaign.  To achieve this, we created two other warzones that happened to be either on, or above the same planet as our main battle.

In this case, we set up a Zone Mortalis board (rules for Zone Mortalis are available from Forge World here) to represent the Tyranid-infested tunnels underneath the overgrown city.  This board was host to a constant stream of smaller games, such as Kill-Team, while the main battle raged above.  Each victory in the tunnels gave 1 VP to the winning team.   In this way, the constant fighting underneath the main battlefield could tilt the favor of the final battle.

Insert Aliens reference here.

You could stop there, but we decided to take it one step further, and add in another layer.

Insert Star Trek reference here.

Using the awesome ruleset of Fantasy Flight's X-Wing Miniatures game, combined with the 40K themed expansion by Masters of the Forge, each team was able to designate a fleet captain, fighting a space battle orbiting the same planet that the rest of the fighting was happening on!  To add some depth to the mission, the fleet battles would add a VP just as the tunnel battles would, and they were also able to forgo a shooting attack to drop an Orbital Bombardment onto the Apocalypse battle as it was happening. 

In this way, not only did every player have a role to play in a huge battle, but they were able to move from game to game if they were itching to try something new.  And in the end, we were able to construct an awesome, multilayered narrative based on our games, and everyone got to say that they were a part of this climactic battle. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and I have no doubt that other players out there will (and already have) thought of unique and interesting ways to integrate multiple games into one narrative event. 

-Vitsika